How Mowing the Lawn Helps My Business

By reading this title, you may think I’m in the landscaping business. Hardly. I have more of a brown vs. green thumb when it comes to that stuff!

The reason mowing the lawn helps my business is that is a time where I have an hour or hour and a half to just let my mind drift. I liken it to an internal brainstorming or whiteboarding session. I have all these thoughts racing through my head on a daily basis and most of my time is usually focused on putting one or multiple of those thoughts into action.

When I’m mowing the lawn, all I’m focused on is making sure all the grass is cut, which doesn’t take a lot of my mental capacity so these other thoughts are constantly bouncing around in my head…it’s almost like some crazy science experiment with ideas zinging back and forth and waiting to bubble over!

What usually results from this crazy experiment is that what may have seemed like random thoughts or events now begin to intermingle. Think of a whiteboard with a bunch of scattered dots on it where my brain starts to make different connections that it wouldn’t normally make if I was trying to connect these dots. This dot connecting includes stringing different ideas together, but also includes putting different people into contact with each other to make some powerful connections.

I realize that mowing the lawn is my own personal science experiment and it won’t work for everyone, but I believe everyone has their own version of mowing the lawn. It could be simply taking a walk or some other form of exercise. It could be meditation, playing with your dog, whatever! The key is to find those things each week where you’ll have at least a couple of hours (maybe in 20 or 30 minute intervals) to let your brain experiment. Your business and your life will be better off for it.